The Semi-Finalists: Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services' MF-EKA Project

This security implementation provides single key access for all employees, customers, and partners of the company to all applications, thereby reducing IT infrastructure complexity, preventing information leakage, thereby increasing regulatory compliance in the organization

MF-Enterprise Key Access or MF-EKA is a secure & structured approach for providing ease of access to all users for business-centric applications, customers, dealers and intranet based application. It allows users access to all applications from one Golden Key.

In today's competitive environment, it is imperative for enterprises to have robust processes to cope up with the ever growing number of users and to avoid technical complexities. There is growth in demand for a variety of portal applications. Portals are becoming more and more sophisticated, with complex technical and functional requirements. Even though the tools are available to build simple portals, the issues of integrating them with remote or legacy data sources are not trivial. One such issue is authentication. Portals need to authenticate users to back-end data sources and applications, yet these applications may each have different underlying security infrastructures. In general, a coherent authentication strategy or a solid authentication framework was missing. Over time it lead to a proliferation of applications, each of which came with their own authentication needs and user repositories. At one time or another, everyone needs to remember multiple usernames and passwords to access different applications on a network. This posed a huge cost for the administration and support departments.

Implemenation, Challenges and Target Users

The objective of MF-EKA is to allow users to access all applications from one identity or the golden key. It provides a unified mechanism to manage the authentication of users and implement business rules determining user access to applications and data. Also, it has been built to accomplish an organization wide assimilation of different IT policy. The stake holders of the project are all entities who are connected with the system of Mahindra Finance directly or in directly. Firstly it has to majorly focus on employees and direct outsourcing resources working within the premises. Secondly, it would be all business units which are connected to the system inclusive of dealers, salesman, auditors, etc.

There were several challenges involved in this implementation. One of them being to identify & cleanse the system and consolidate it to one MF-EKA OpenLDAP directory. Next challenge was in identifying different elements of different applications and synchronize them with the MF-EKA database. For password synchronization, keeping the proprietarship intact of product based system was another big task.

THE RESULT

A global enterprise GOLDEN KEY was created for each user and it was mapped with each application which resulted in a common infrastructure that can be centrally managed and secured. There were secure delegations of credentials which enabled end-to-end security, across application and system boundaries. Also, it reduced help desk costs by reduction in the volume of password requests.